Zope Dons a New Hat

Digital Creations CEO Paul Everitt filled me in on the company's plans to focus on building content management systems

CONTENT MANAGEMENT
At last months internet World, Digital Creations CEO Paul Everitt filled me in on the companys plans to focus on building content management systems.

Although known largely for its open-source Zope application server, Digital Creations (www.digicool.com) takes a refreshingly service-oriented approach to its business.

The company sees itself not as an application server company but as a content management consulting business with a flexible and capable tool set. Its primary goal is to use its tools to complete fixed-price content management consulting contracts successfully, quickly and inexpensively - not to develop freely downloadable software. "It costs a lot of money to give things away for free," Everitt said.
As part of its consulting efforts, Digital Creations has developed a comprehensive workflow framework called Content Management Framework. The software is Web-based and provides document routing, approval, check-in, check-out and full-text search features.
The software uses Zope as its application server and stores documents (including multimedia data) and system metadata in Zopes object-oriented database.

Multiple versions of documents can be stored in order to roll back to an earlier copy, if desired, and the softwares interface can be customized using templates to present different users with different functions.
Content Management Framework should ship this month.

Timothy Dyck is a Senior Analyst with eWEEK Labs. He has been testing and reviewing application server, database and middleware products and technologies for eWEEK since 1996. Prior to joining eWEEK, he worked at the LAN and WAN network operations center for a large telecommunications firm, in operating systems and development tools technical marketing for a large software company and in the IT department at a government agency. He has an honors bachelors degree of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a masters of arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.